The Universal Curator is an interactive artifact sited for the Hunt Museum Limerick Ireland It is configured in order to explore the affordances of particular combinations of artefacts that aim to encourage and facilitate different forms of co-participation, within a museum setting. The project within which this piece was created is part of an ongoing close collaboration between the artist Cleverly and the department of Management’s Work Interaction and Technology research group at King’s College London. SHAPE is devoted to understanding, developing and evaluating room-sized assemblies of hybrid, mixed reality artefacts in public places.‘The Universal Curator’ provides opportunities for visitors to reflect on some key pieces in the Hunt collection and to explore, examine, inspect, juxtapose and re-assemble those pieces in novel ways. It also designed to facilitate interaction, co-participation and collaboration around an assembly of interrelated and interdependent elements.

This collaborative project between sociologists and artist provided a unique opportunity for the creation of a specifically designed work to facilitate study of interactions with and around exhibits in a variety of museums and galleries. The data collection, evaluation and analysis of visitor behaviour has, in turn, informed the design of subsequent assemblies, and forms part of a growing repository of knowledge for curators. The results of this study are published in ‘Crafting Participation and the Universal Curator, C Heath’, J Cleverly and J.Hindmarsh, Kings College London Shaping technologies for museum design and interaction.presented at University of Nottingham Mixed Reality Lab.